SOLSTICE MEDITATION

This time of year always makes me feel deracinated, which is to say uprooted.  There is a seemingly endless series of holidays, when there is no mail, stores are closed, and the TV is disrupted, all of it punctuated by my birthday.  The daylight dwindles to an annual minimum, even here in the south it is cold, and worst of all, school is out.  At the age of two my parents sent me to the Sunnyside Progressive School in Astoria, Queens [this was four years before Stalin had Trotsky murdered, a crime that tore the school apart], and for the next seventy-two years my inner calendar was governed by the tempos of academia.  Christmas and New Year’s Day were for me the middle of the year, not the end of the old and the beginning of the new.  My annual pocket datebooks, courtesy of the Harvard Coop, even began in June and ended in October, an arrangement that struck me as so natural that I was startled to discover that Susie’s datebooks start in January and end in December.

Twelve years ago, I retired, calling it quits after half a century.  When the next September rolled around, I could feel my juices stirring, only to realize in dismay that I had no classes to meet, no syllabi to draft, no students to welcome.  Ever since, I have been trying one way or another to get back into the classroom.  For the first several years, I taught in Duke University’s Learning in Retirement program, but that was not really the same thing.  I started and ran this blog, and I even spent a year as an unpaid volunteer at Bennett College in Greensboro, under the guidance of my old Afro-Am Chair Esther Terry, who was Bennett’s Acting President.  

Twice, I had the opportunity to teach a course at UNC Chapel Hill, once in the Public Policy doctoral program and once in the Philosophy Department.  Both were wonderful returns to the classroom, but that, it seemed, was that.  Desperate to continue teaching, I even recorded and posted on YouTube thirty lectures on several different subjects.

Then, three years ago, My son Tobias and his good friend Peter Pazziglini conspired to get me elected to Columbia University’s Society of Senior Scholars, and a year later, I began co-teaching a course at Columbia with my old student and friend Todd Gitlin, who had somehow transitioned from a youthful radical, the third president of SDS, into a distinguished much published senior professor and Director of the Pulitzer School of Journalism’s doctoral program.  I was back!

The second go-round of our course has now ended, and I await the very last paper before we submit the grades and close the books on Sociology GU6400.  In two weeks and a bit more, I shall start teaching Philosophy 471 [“Karl Marx’s Critique of Capitalism”] in the UNC Chapel Hill Philosophy Department.  This academic year, I actually have what the elite sector of American higher education considers a half-time teaching load.

How long can this continue?  On this, my very last day as an eighty-five year old, the only reasonable answer is, Who knows?  There is but one thing more to say, and Dylan Thomas said it best:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.